Wouldn’t it be useful to know precisely how much time and resource should be applied to each of your assets? With Asset Criticality, organizations are able to rate assets to determine how critical each piece of equipment is to areas such as safety, product quality, customer issues, environmental issues, and production.

During this 40 minute recorded session, guest speaker Terry Harris from Reliable Process Solutions LLC provides an overview of Asset Criticality and Risk Ranking and discusses how to:

Concerned about preparing for an upcoming outage? The factor that will most likely lead to a schedule overrun is the transition period along the critical path. During these hand offs communication is key. Each individual has a different perspective and making sure the team works together is vital to ensuring minimal time is lost during a shutdown and that everyone adheres to the schedule. Every minute of downtime during an outage is money lost. To ensure success every department should have these roles defined before going into an outage:

By defining key roles and responsibilities, maintenance departments will experience key benefits such as ensuring the plan is well-done and well-executed, improving timeliness of communication, engaging more people effectively, and keeping momentum high throughout the outage.

You can view the entire recording of eMaint’s Best Practices Webinar on Planning and Scheduling for Outages presented by Randy Pound here.

Within the Value Driven Maintenance methodology, created by Mainnovation, there are four main value drivers that can help improve cash flows. By measuring and analyzing each driver an organization can increase their value potential of maintenance which is the sum of all free cash flows that are derived from improving one of the following:

Asset Utilization – (Improving uptime, selling more products)

Cost Control – (Reducing maintenance and reliability spending

SHE – (Safety, Health, and Environmental legislation compliance)

Resource Allocation – (Reducing spare parts inventory)

In many organizations there is one driver that is significantly higher than the others. This is the dominant driver, and it can differ between plant and line. To speed up business results, each individual line should focus on improving their dominant driver.

To watch the entire recording on Building a Winning Maintenance Strategy with Value Driven maintenance, by Guy Delahay, click here.

eMaint Enterprises presented at the 2011 SMRP (Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals) Conference in Greensboro, NC from October 17-20. They were joined by over 900 other Maintenance and Reliability Professionals and over 100 other companies.

During the week, eMaint connected with partners, customers, and prospective clients. The conference included Workshops, Plant Tours, and Best Practices information sessions. Both Gene Pargas and Lisa Williams represented eMaint at the conference and enjoyed attending various Best Practices sessions as well as conversing with show attendees.

Thank you to all who stopped by the eMaint booth. Visit our Facebook page to view pictures and videos from Greensboro, and check back next week for more updates from the 2011 SMRP conference.

For more than three decades, Micro-Coax has been serving the defense, telecommunications, and test/measurement marketplace with their high-performance, cost-effective solutions to the most challenging microwave cable configuration problems. Facilities Manager, Brian O’Connell, discusses below the challenges, implementation, and benefits of using a CMMS in the Micro-Coax Maintenance Department.

Challenges

Micro-Coax began searching for a CMMS about 2 years ago. We explored our present CMMS system supplier, trying to get it to communicate with our ERP system, but were dissatisfied with the results. I once found myself in a hour-long conference call with our I.T. director, our ERP in-house person, myself, and our Maintenance Supervisor, speaking to our ERP Consultant, to go over the email I sent previously with a detailed list of questions. At the end of the meeting, it dawned upon me we had spent $250.00 in direct costs to our ERP consultant and wasted several hours of time for each of the individuals listed above in order to get some questions defined that I had already submitted. This was looking like a long and painful road.

Implementation

I began looking around at other systems from other companies, with the idea of using Excel to import into our ERP. The entire concept of SaaS was new to me, and instantly I saw the benefits as if it were made just for us: low initial cost, no server space to hold the program, ease of use on-site and off and limited involvement by our overstressed I.T. department. We won management approval, and eMaint X3 was turned on in August 2010.

Our past system was a home-grown version of Excel, and while it was a first step, its difficulty made it a roadblock to quantify each and every job performed. The implementation of eMaint was easy. It involved getting the assets entered correctly as documentation revolves around the asset numbers. Once we knew what we wanted to see, we customized the reports desired from the list of available reports and we were on our way. Daily reports of previous day’s activity enables us to see what my direct employees and contractors accomplished.

Benefits

In the year since, we have completed and documented a staggering number of jobs. Our craftsman and contractors use the system basically to justify the hours they have on their timecards or invoices. When a request is submitted, and approved, it is assigned and from there our craftsman self manage their work.

Once we got over the hump regarding the task of documenting each job, the craftsman were on board. Then when we showed them the job count, and how many jobs each one was doing each month, the increase in self pride was obvious. Now the craftsman ask for work orders for each job they run across, and instead of viewing it as an roadblock, they understand this is a visible validation of their hard work. In addition, having a system as easy to use, and easy to view past history as eMaint is, allows us to look for past clues on how a problem was solved. Additionally, we have a much better PM management system in place, allowing us to do things the same way each time we perform a PM evolution.

If I ran into program problems with eMaint, I kept a logbook with issues to discuss with eMaint and we emailed, or called, to resolve. Response has been good, and most of our issues are resolved quickly, and if not we keep discussing until we come to a resolution. We have not needed enough support to generate an invoice as of yet. My maintenance team is computer savvy, but we still needed to go over some items from time to time.

Results

The past year was exciting, interesting, and revealed a lot about this company’s maintenance department. We always thought we did a good job, but there is a big difference in our upper management’s eyes when we now tell them ‘Let me show you’ instead of ‘I feel’. Now we have documentation showing our strengths and our weaknesses. Using eMaint has brought pride to the department, allowed continuity in job plans and PM performance, and allowed us to work on our areas of concern. These were not goals when I began the search for a CMMS system, but since have eclipsed the system itself and really have made us a more efficient department. We are now exploring how to use eMaint in our engineering department and our tool and die department.

The maintenance department at Aroplax was faced with the difficult, if not impossible task of handling its maintenance functions and responsibilities with no computerized or automated system in place. The inability to properly schedule and track preventive maintenance on their critical assets was creating serious issues with downtime, subsequently causing problems in production and having a significant financial impact on the company.

Implementation

Even before being selected as the vendor of choice, eMaint proved its ability to provide Aroplax with the solution it was seeking. Working in partnership with Aroplax maintenance manager, Ed Radeke, eMaint specialists configured Aroplax’s X3 account – including screen layouts, field lookups and system options – to meet his objectives. In addition, eMaint team members provided a series of targeted, hands-on learning sessions, known as the eMaint “Road To Success”, to ensure that Aroplax personnel could easily begin using their new CMMS solution.Within 3 weeks of being introduced to eMaint for the first time, Aroplax is now up and running with the maintenance management tool they needed. With eMaint X3 in place, they could now properly schedule and track their critical maintenance tasks and get accurate reports on their assets and workflow.

Outages or shutdowns are the most critical aspect of maintenance reliability. Through careful planning and standardization, any organization can excel at managing outages. Randy Pound runs through some key steps to consider before, during and after an outage.

First, the reliability and production team must work together not only during an outage but also through daily activities. Performing as one team at all times will lead any company to success.

Each organization should consider the following:

Before an outage:

– Make sure each individual has the applied skills to handle their aspect of the outage

– Make sure that the available parts are fit for the service

-Have each technician ready to jump in when equipment is shut down in order to reduce loss of profitability

During an outage:

– Use available technicians that are skilled to handle each specific outage

Orange County Container Group, a leading integrated paperboard and paper-based packaging manufacturer operating within the U.S. and Northern Mexico was recently featured in the the August/September 2011 issue of Uptime Magazine for achieveing over $3 million in savings with their eMaint X3 CMMS.

Bill Chant, Director of Maintenance and Engineering at OCCG, launched the CMMS pilot after ensuring it met several guidelines including:

Please join us as Dan and Julie Floen, President and CEO of Professional Materials Management, Inc, discuss and demonstrate how your CMMS can provide you with information to help answer these questions about reducing your inventory.

The BIG question they will address is how to make the most of your inventory investment while preserving service levels to your user community and customers.

Inventory represents a major financial investment. But, cutting inventory can open us up to costly risks if not done correctly.

So, what is a wise maintenance manager to do??

Dan and Julie will demonstrate how your CMMS can provide you with information to help you answer these questions.